Mary Morrissy on Nora Barnacle: 'I give her a completely different life without Joyce'
Mary Morrissy will read at Words by Water: Kinsale Literary Festival. Picture: Denis Scannell
Mary Morrissy says the best piece of advice she has ever been given was to just keep writing.
“When I was a very young writer, I sent in one of my stories to Listowel Writers Week. It got placed but didn’t win so I wrote to the judge Bryan MacMahon looking for advice. He wrote back Solvitur Scribendo, which Latin for ‘It’s solved by writing,’ and it’s stood to me ever since.”
Morrissy is the author of three previous novels, Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey, as well as two collections of stories.
She wrote as a journalist for many years and, until recently, was the Associate Director of Creative Writing at University College Cork. Her latest book, Penelope Unbound, is a speculative fiction novel that imagines a life for Nora Barnacle without James Joyce.
“In 2015, I was invited to the James Joyce Summer School in Trieste,” explains Morrissy. “It’s run by Professor John McCourt, who knows pretty much everything about Joyce’s life. He was taking us on a tour of the city and all the places associated with Joyce and stopped at the railway station.
"He told us how Nora and James had arrived there in 1904. Joyce had left her waiting with the luggage, and went to find somewhere to stay. He got involved in a brawl in the main square and was taken away to a prison where he remained for a day and a night. I just couldn’t get this image out of my head.”
In real life, of course, Joyce came back for Nora Barnacle, but in Morrissey’s novel, he never returns.
“So, in a kind of sliding door scenario, I give her a completely different life without him,” she says. “This is a world where Ulysses never gets written. In fact, in my story, Joyce becomes an opera singer.”
Of course, it’s impossible to mention Nora Barnacle without thinking of Joyce. Did Morrissy deliberately sideline him for that reason?
“This is speculative historical fiction,” she points out. “So I was keen to separate them as a couple because it gives you the chance to see her imaginatively as not just the wife of one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. James Joyce is such a presence.
"In terms of Nora’s life, she’s always been a companion and also his muse. I wanted to create a different Nora who has a different life and relationship. There’s a reunion ten years after he’d left her in the book, but I can’t tell you what happens…”
Morrissy started writing the tale as a short story but gradually realised there was potential for the longer form.
"I suppose true historical stories speak to the facts in as much as is known. But there are gaps in the historical records that nobody knows. I felt free to invent inside these gaps.
"In this novel, I was completely leaping into the fiction. I made up an alternative life. In ways, you have to the same amount of research because to depart from the facts, you have to make sure they are solid.
"There was something about when John McCourt pointed out where Nora sat waiting that made the hairs rise up on the back of my neck. Once you have that feeling, it becomes a compulsion or an obsession. That’s when you know you have to write that story.”
Morrissy began writing her fiction by hand as a way of separating from her day job as a journalist.
“I started writing in my late teens and I’ve been writing ever since. A few times over that period I thought that maybe I should give this up, but I’ve been at it so long what else would I do with my time? I love it and I hate it. It’s a mix of the two.
"I tried to separate my professional life and personal. With fiction, I needed a different process, a slower process. I start all my first drafts by hand now rather than typing. It’s become a kind of superstition.
"Sometimes when you do something a certain way, you are afraid to change it in case something magical will be lost.”
- Published by Banshee Press, Penelope Unbound will be on shelves from October 5. Morrissey will take part in several events at Words by Water: Kinsale Literary Festival, which runs in the Co Cork town Oct 5-8
The Innishannon author talks about her decades of writing about rural Ireland.
The celebrated author chats to the Newstalk presenter about some of his hugely successful novels.
As John Cooper Clarke famously wrote: “To express oneself, In 17 syllables, Is very diffic…” Perhaps Cork poet O’Sullivan can help you with the short Japanese form she’s so well versed in.
Easily the greatest double act on the Irish biography scene. An occasional prompt from Howard will have Collins rolling out his fantastic tales from the world of football.
Disha Bose, Sara O’Donovan, and Mary Morrissy read from their latest books.
